JohnSki reported that the final report has been submitted for the village of DeForest grant for “What’s in YOUR Water?” However, he submitted it too soon, as there are a few expenses still outstanding. Those expenses will have to be covered by the general DAP treasury. Sorry for jumping the gun.

There are five members on the newly formed Election Committee: Karen, Frank, Bill, Peter, and Janet. Karen volunteered to chair the committee. Although the committee will decide what it wants to do, we brainstormed a few items for the committee to consider: campaign signs, doors, voter ID, buttons, contact lists. The committee wants to make sure we organize sufficiently ahead of time to be effective when helping with campaigns and other activities such as voter registration before elections. Karen is doing a flyer to get information out to people.

Peter has been to a lot of meetings lately and had a lot of information and some opinions to share. On the upcoming Democratic state convention, he said that this is important because it is one of the few opportunities we will have to influence the party at that level. Progressives in the party must take this opportunity to exercise what influence we can at this stage. Lanning and Smith seem to be the progressives’ candidates for state chair. Peter said progressives need to take over the party. We should set up a hospitality table at the monthly county party meetings. Dems have been avoiding specific issues, and we must change the current state party attitude that candidates should not address specific issues in detail. Peter questioned why the conventions seem to be held always in the southern part of the state and why voting for state chair cannot be done other than in person at the conventions. Maybe some party rule changes are in order.

On another topic, Peter wondered if petitions are effective as a tool to influence decision making and whether or not we should encourage more petition circulation at all levels, including the national level. What are the different methods of circulating petitions? Can we get petitions out quickly via the internet? Karen pointed out that while the internet is a quick and effective way to circulate petitions, much of the state of Wisconsin outside the urban areas does not have access to sufficient bandwidth.

Not much is happening regarding our participation in the DeForest 4th of July celebration. John St. and Ginny are going to call the DeForest Chamber of Commerce to find out what is going on.

Future projects: do we need one? Ginny wondered if we might have a petition drive. There are on line tools like Credo. MoveOn.org has one. With Credo, you create a petition and they send it to their email list.

Leonardo noted that Bernie Sanders has put a new complexion on the national Democratic run for president. Sanders will force discussions of topics on the left. Maybe it will encourage the extinction of the “DINOs” – Democrats In Name Only.

We received some handouts describing the process to fulfill the new voter ID requirement in Wisconsin.